Search results

The purpose of this paper is to study a wide range of culinary tastes and their legitimacy in a contemporary urban context. The authors aim at finding out which cuisines are the most popular and to what extent this popularity translates into eating out.

Survey data (n=1715) gathered among young adults residing in Helsinki (aged 25-44) measuring preferences and restaurant visits for 19 cuisine types. Measures for expressed legitimacy and actualised legitimacy for all the 19 cuisine types.

The most preferred cuisine types are pizza, other Italian fare and traditional Nordic fare, including home cooking. The most visited restaurants by cuisine type are pizza, fast food and Italian. However, the most legitimate (both expressed and actualised) cuisines are Korean, African, fine dining and French. Several dissonances were found between stated likes and actual consumer behaviour. The results suggest that although fast food bears a stigma as socially unacceptable cuisine, it is, nonetheless, very frequently eaten in the restaurants.

As the data account only for a fraction of the population, limited by both age and region, it would be relevant for future research to investigate this on a larger scale in order to make (inter)nationally representative conclusions.

A research design taking into account such a wide range of cuisine types has not been presented before.

Focusing on a community organisation, the purpose of this paper is to unravel the process through which infringing contested practices that threaten or compromise the community’s sense of distinction are transformed into acceptable symbolic markers.

An ethnographic study comprising participant observation, in-depth interviews and secondary data was conducted in the context of a non-profit community cinema.

Taking a longitudinal approach and drawing from practice theory, this paper outlines how member-driven, customer-driven and necessity-imposed infringing practices settle in new contexts. Further, this paper demonstrates that such practices are filtered in terms of their ideological “fit” with the organisation and are, as a result, rejected, recontextualised or replaced with do-it-yourself alternatives. In this process, authority shifts from the contested practice to community members and eventually to the space as a whole, ensuring the singularisation of the cinema-going experience.

This paper addresses how the integration of hegemonic practices to an off-the-mainstream experience can provide a differentiation tool, aiding resisting organisations to compensate for their lack of resources.

While the appropriation practices that communities use to ensure distinction are well documented, there is little understanding of the journey that negatively contested practices undergo in their purification to more community-friendly forms. This paper theorises this journey by outlining how the objects, meanings and doings that comprise hegemonic practices are transformed by and transforming of resisting organisations.

The aim of this research is to explore how and why different migrant groups see different values in places they move to. Understanding these values and also the conditions in which these values are shaped will help in targeting marketing effort.

The hierarchical and K‐means cluster analyses were instrumental in identifying different migrant clusters. Planned contrasts were employed to compare related pairs of clusters. The logistic regression analysis identified several determinants of cluster membership likelihood.

Four different internal migrant clusters are identified in the Hawke's Bay region of New Zealand. These are Material Success Seekers, Community/Environment Folks, Apathetics, and All‐rounders. The former two express a fragmentalist lifestyle. Material Success Seekers emphasise regional business opportunities while being indifferent to social and natural resources. In contrast, Community/Environment Folks emphasise social and natural resources while maintaining indifference to business opportunities. In turn, the latter two clusters make up a holistic lifestyle: All‐rounders consider all three major characteristics of the region to be important while apathetics totally deemphasise these characteristics. The planned contrasts show that demographics are instrumental in predicting differences between related clusters but not helpful in distinguishing the identified lifestyles.

The limitation of this investigation is that the important constructs used to cluster migrants are not well calibrated, although the reliability scores appear to be satisfactory. Moreover, the use of four‐point importance scales does not allow attaining a greater level of construct sensitivity. The research method is unique in a sense that the cluster analysis and the planned contrasts are applied to examine contrasting values of migrant collectivities.

A number of specific practical challenges need to be resolved by the regional decision makers in order to enhance place satisfaction by internal migrant collectivities. First, the regional and city councils will need to tailor different services, facilities, and public spaces to appeal to different requirements of migrant clusters. Second, the region's settlement support agency should provide migrants with relevant, focused, and differentiated information about available services and resources to suit their various life goals, aspirations, and values.

This investigation tackles the problem of lacking theoretical and empirical research foundation on internal migration as a marketing phenomenon. Moreover, it is unique in its approach of conceptualising migrant segments as cultural phenomena, that is, interdependent collectivities that form on the basis of contrasting values.

Recent discussions of how members of the middle classes define themselves have focused on cultural patterns, following Bourdieu's (1984) influential work on how occupational, educational, and cultural fields combine to configure classes. Researchers have extended this approach to studies of the emerging middle classes in the global South, adapting these concepts to the specific circumstances of postcolonial settings in a globalizing world. This chapter explores these processes among urban middle-class Chileans. I show how members of the middle classes seek meaningful identities while engaging in symbolic combat with other groups in a society historically marked by an aristocratic elite, a recent military dictatorship, and free market policies that have reconfigured the possibilities for upward and downward mobility while integrating Chile more firmly within global commodity and image circuits. The principal foci of conflict are cultural consumption, childrearing and education, as well as electronic media use. Members of Chile's middle classes are locked in an unresolved conflict over who they are, who they should be, and where they fit in the global cultural economy.

This study aims to understand the characteristics and formation of artists’ production sensibilities and relations with other actors within an emerging hybrid art market structure.

To unravel senses and map out relationships and structures in the context of this study, qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews and analysis of secondary data sources, were applied.

The authors describe three art production sensibilities and market-based relationship logics rooted in the artist and the artwork’s diverse role in the market.

The findings suggest that artistic sensibilities motivate managers working in the hybrid art market to develop a more nuanced positioning of artists and their creative outputs to improve harmony and collaboration.

This study demonstrates that the hybrid structure of art markets allows for the harmonious separation and collaboration of non-market (artistic) and market logics. This study uncovers how artists combine their non-market creative position with market needs in the process of marketization and hybridization.

This study aims to explore passionate labour in the fashion blogosphere and addresses two research questions: How does passion animate passionate labour? How does the emotion of passions and the discipline of labour fuse within passionate labour?

This study presents a three-year netnographic fieldwork of replikate fashion blogger-preneurs. Data are based on in-depth interviews, blogs, social media posts and informed by the relationships developed across these platforms.

Throughout the findings, this study unpacks the “little passions” that animate the passionate labour of blogger-preneurs. Passions include: passion for performing the royal lifestyle, the mobilisation of passion within strategic sociality and transformation and self-renewal through blogging. Lastly, the cycle of passion illustrates how passions can be recycled into new passionate projects.

This study offers insight on how passionate labour requires the negotiation and mobilisation of emotion alongside a calculated understanding of market logics.

This study raises implications for aspiring blogger-preneurs, luxury brand managers and organisations beyond the blogging context.

The contribution of this study lies in the cultural understanding of passion as a form of labour where passion has become a way of life. The theorisation of passionate labour contributes to existing research in three ways. First, this study identifies social mimesis as a driver of passionate labour and its links to class distinction. Second, it offers insight on how passionate labour requires the negotiation and mobilisation of emotion alongside a calculated understanding of market logics. Third, it advances critical debate around exploitation and inequality within digital labour by demonstrating how passion is unequally distributed.

The paper aims to discuss the tensions between rock and pop genres at Rock in Rio, the most significant music festival in Brazil (which also has had international editions in Portugal, Spain and the USA), analyzing the construction and consolidation of Rock in Rio as a rock-related brand and mapping the disputes, negotiations and controversies between rock and pop music fans.

The authors analyze those facts from a framework composed by discussions about musical genres (Frith, 1996; Blacking, 1995), social constructions about rock and pop, as well as debates about taste as performance (Hennion, 2007) on digital platforms. The corpus consists of 58 posts published between 2018 and 2019 in the period prior to Rock in Rio 2019, analyzed qualitatively.

By recalling the history of Rock in Rio, the authors demonstrate that the discourses and strategies involving the festival are contradictory, which reflects on disputes about the meanings of festivals on social media. A diverse set of controversy was found, such as discussions about the artists' authenticity as well as arguments that refer to the social constructions linked to certain musical genres.

The paper analyzes the Rock in Rio music festival from a perspective that is not observed very often, offering insights about the relevance of music genres as mediators of the perception of the festival as a brand and the controversies involving fans and anti-fans.

The purpose of the present study is to examine how local consumers disassociate themselves from migrants' acculturative practices and negotiate their identity through the symbolic consumption of fashion.

Data for this interpretive study were obtained via phenomenological interviews with locally-born Chinese youth in Guangzhou, China, to examine their acculturative consumption practices as well as their subjective experiences of perceived threats to their lifestyle imposed by the influx of outsiders. Snowballing and purposive sampling methods were adopted in recruiting the research participants.

Data analyses revealed that local consumers adopt three dissociative strategies (stigmatization, avoidance and self-assertion) in order to ascribe meanings to their fashion consumption practices as a means of resolving identity conflicts and differentiate themselves from the migrant consumers.

This research offers a single perspective (i.e. that of local-born young consumers residing in Guangzhou) on the locals' attitudes aimed at distinguishing and negotiating their identities in an intercultural setting via specific fashion-clothing choices. This research has theoretical implications for the consumer acculturation theory and identity negotiation.

Findings yielded by the present study have important implications for commercial companies focusing on fashion consumption, in particular for marketing practices aimed at rural-urban identification and youth market segmentation.

This study contributes to the existing discussion on consumer acculturation by offering an intracultural perspective to the understanding of local consumers' responses to migrants' acculturation. It also provides managerial insights for fashion retailers, prompting them to rethink their market segmentation strategies to address population mobility in the marketplace and better understand how it alters the in-between social relationships that result in different consumption patterns and practices.

This study contributes to the existing discussion on youth consumer acculturation theories by offering an intercultural perspective to the understanding of local consumers' responses to migrants' acculturation attempts. It also offers managerial insights for fashion retailers, prompting them to rethink their market segmentation strategies to address population mobility and better understand how it alters the social relationships that result in different consumption patterns and practices.

The chapter is an auto-ethnographic account of the self-management of a chronic illness within the context of a participatory research project on Mediterranean Diet (MD). A group of Italian women with type 2 diabetes is following a non-medical, personal interpretation of the Mediterranean-style diet. The research account is preceded by a critical appraisal of the scientific narratives of the MD.

Analysis of epidemiological research on MD examines some methodological aspects of gender blindness in its scientific approach. The ethnography concerns self-management of MD diet and redefinition of gender relations.

MD is analyzed as a case of transplantation of yesterday’s cultural and social capitals of the peasant classes, to today’s discourses on food considered as appropriate for affluent people suffering from satiety diseases. The ethnography highlights gender aspects of biographical work, examining in particular a “conversion” dietary model.

The ethnography must be amplified to include women and men from different social classes with various Mediterranean cooking habits, and family and gender patterns.

The chapter highlights cultural processes for women’s empowerment in self-managing type 2 diabetes.

This chapter may represent a seminal sociological work on chronic illness, gender and food studies in one of the “native” contexts of the Mediterranean-style diet.

This study conceptualizes a form of luxury consumption in which luxury brands collaborate with unconventional non-luxury partners. These unconventional luxury brand collaborations are growing in popularity among Chinese luxury consumers of the post-1990s generation. Luxury brands are exploring new branding strategies due to the growing commercial importance of Chinese luxury consumers.

An in-depth qualitative study informs this paper. Interviews with young adult luxury consumers self-identifying as Chinese reveal a growing interest for luxury brands that collaborate with odd partners in social media and online culture.

Unconventional collaborations between luxury brands and non-luxury partners catalyze shifting meanings of luxury through the following juxtapositions: ephemeral instead of timeless, trendy rather than inaccessible, and playful in contrast with traditional. First, young Chinese consumers construct luxury meanings through ephemerality, like digital possessions, social media fame and fleeting experiences. Second, luxury meanings emerge in trendiness among social media influencers and online culture rather than in the seemingly inaccessible taste regimes of the upper class. Third, younger consumers appreciate fun, rebellious and over-the-top aesthetics in luxury brands.

The study contributes to the nascent field of unconventional luxury by conceptualizing how unusual, odd and unexpected collaborations constitute new forms of luxury consumption. The shifting meanings of luxury consumption that this study conceptualizes raise new opportunities and challenges for luxury brands. One of such is the release of limited collections with non-luxury partners seemingly at the opposite spectrum of design, image and values. Moreover, the study adds nuance to the understanding of luxury consumption among young Chinese consumers.